The hero of Markus Werner’s 1985 novel The Frog in the Throat is Franz Thalmann, a disgraced, divorced, defrocked clergyman, who lives ashamed and diminished, yet nevertheless resilient in a philosophical recalculation of his life. There’s a major complication to Franz’s reevaluation though: the memory (or ghost?) of his stern father Klement turns up as a literal (or is it just metaphorical?) frog in his throat. Klement presents as a tragicomic, pestering apparition who ventriloquizes his son—and the novel—with rural grumbles. He milks cows, rants against modernity, and accuses Franz of having betrayed the world he was born into. In Michael Hofmann’s translation, Werner’s prose is crisp, dryly mortified and quietly savage: intimate cruelty turned into a dark, pinprick comedy about guilt, family, and the stubbornness of provincial life.
The voices of son and father drive The Frog in the Throat. These voices collide in bursts that never find harmony. There are ten punchy chapters: Thalmann the Younger takes the odd chapters; Daddy Klement narrates the even ones. Franz’s chapters are philosophical, discursive, and given to a choppy, aphoristic rhythm. (Franz does, however, declare at one point, “Well. I’m not a philosopher, am I. I’m a put-upon frogman with too little oxygen.) Klement’s sections are denser and earthier, but, for all their ravings and rantings, somehow easier to digest. The voices prickle and stick, evoking that ancient tale, a failure to communicate. This is not a duet, not a dialogue.
Franz, helming the novel’s odd chapters, takes the lead. Here’s childhood, adolescence, nascent adulthood, distilled into fragments:
Obedience. Belief. Suffering. Instructions followed. Expectations fulfilled. Said yes and please and thank you and three bags full, sir. Controlled stray impulses. Cleaned teeth, ditto ears. Swilled elderberry syrup. Studied the Good Book. Knew mastery and eventually self-mastery. Did what was dinned into me, and eventually started doing some dinning of my own. Shoveled snow. Madonnified women. Got in shape. Fiddled. Suffered. Was afraid. Could barely stand Father’s glower. Rarely laughed. Prayed. Fed swine. Visited libraries. Mucked out the cowshed. Dogmas, apologias, ethics. Kissed Helen. Struggled for purity. Homiletics, catechesis, liturgy. Forswore eggs. Was afraid. Was good. Marriage. Ministry.
Franz betrays Helen not in a torrid tryst or a meaningful long-term affair with an extramarital soulmate. It’s a one-off, an almost comically ordinary lapse. It’s not a fling; it’s a thing that happens—and yet it detonates his life, initiating an existential crisis in Franz-as-preacher:
Once it’s been understood that our existential crisis is first and foremost a crisis of our senses, then in spite of metaphysical obfuscations we can see the therapy: The extension and promotion of sensuality. An expansion of the realm of the senses. Humanity will only have a future if we are successful in establishing a new Age of Tulips. The individual sets aside his gloom as soon as he feels his body is a house of joy. A precondition for this is moral enfeeblement, because morality has seen its role for thousands of years as an impediment to French kisses. To put it briefly: Traditional morality impedes sensuality.
Franz’s desire for sensuality is undercut by an intellectual airiness, a quippiness of the spirit. Our man is full of aphorisms:
Castrate the fathers, gag the mothers.
and
I say again, gladly: Happiness is remote.
and
Cleared out the attic, threw all the rubbish away. My concern: The head empty of rubbish and without level crossing attendant will produce badness.
and
Humor, though. Almost eludes description. Strangely adorable bastard child of love and wistfulness.
You can throw a small dart in this short book and find a nice line from Franz. (I plucked most of these from very early in the novel, before too much of the (non)plot develops.)
But back to our Franz’s claim that “Traditional morality impedes sensuality” and thus human joy requires “moral enfeeblement” — a problem for a one-time theologian.
In contrast, Franz’s father Klement expresses an earthy sensuality in each of his chapters; he milks his cows and reflects on their udders, their calfing, their literal breeding. His bovine reflections drift into memories of his family, sketching out the often painful history of his children. We also come to see that, like his son, Klement is an outsider. He doesn’t quite fit in at the local pub. The other patrons can’t comprehend his contempt for the modern world.
Some of the finest moments in The Frog in the Throat happen when Franz wanders into a theme that Klement, grumbling from the cowshed, will half-pick up on in the next chapter—less a conversation than a comic game of misheard telephone. These echoes and prefigurations create a thematic tone, however discordant. Take for instance middle-aged Franz, feeling as if he’ll never really mature:
I’ll be fifty soon and I wonder what being grown-up will feel like. Was I grown-up when I turned twenty-two? For a bet, then, I ate a coffee cup. No problem. My stomach was equal to the challenge. Today, I poke at my sauerkraut. An un-grown-up way of behaving, only confirming one’s suspicion that being grown-up, like everything else, is a passing condition.
And a chapter later, Klement confirms Franz’s intuition:
People remain a mystery, you can read a hundred books and you’ll be no closer to understanding them, that’s my view, and when I was younger, I always used to think: When I’m older, I’ll work it out. You see, when you’re young, you see old fellows with white hair, and you think: They may be old and knackered, but they have experience of life, they’re not floundering like us, and maybe they have wisdom. And suddenly you’re old and gray yourself, and you realize that’s all you are, old and gray and just as clueless as you ever were, and so I say: No one’s got the secret. I often think we should view everything from above, we should look down on the world from way up high, and who knows what we would see, what connections, what never-guessed bridges and linkages, or then again maybe not. What a tangled mess, what a confused jumble, I don’t know.
Perhaps the two preceding passages might give a prospective reader the incorrect impression that The Frog in the Throat is a dour novel; it is not. It is often quite funny and quite moving. It’s easy to identify with Franz’s groping questions, and as the book progresses, we come to see under Klement’s anger a wounded pathos. Perhaps the father’s name is not ultimately ironic; perhaps there is a mercy in his haunting his son. Maybe Franz sees the past with new eyes (or, rather ears) through his father’s visitation. But I’m inclined to agree with translator Michael Hofmann in his introduction, when he suggests that “reconciliation is out of the question, but equally there is no possibility of not laughing.”
Synthesis between father and son was never the goal of this novel, let alone a metaphysical coherence. Rather, Werner seems to express his own literary ambitions most directly near the end of the novel, when his antihero Franz declares his admiration for novels that
…are subversive, making clear that their authors, in writing them, did so to avoid doing something far worse…the books that crackle subtly, the semi-house-trained powder kegs of books, the incautious, unconsidered, and if you like erroneous ones…
I’m not sure that The Frog in the Throat is a powder keg, but it does crackle subtly.
I have perhaps overshared Werner’s prose in this review. The truth is I just really loved the way his sentences stack up. And I must again applaud translator Michael Hofmann’s work here; his new translation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was one of my favorite reads in recent memory. So I’ll share one last stack of sentences, again from a Franz section. It’s a passage I dogeared, perhaps thinking it exemplary of the novel’s sharp pacing and shifts between pathos and dark humor:
In the morning I’m miserable, at night I’m scared, and during the day I am at pains not to attract attention, putting one foot in front of the other, forming sentences, combing my hair, leaving tips for the waitstaff and buying five tomatoes and answering the telephone in my best and brightest voice, reading this and that in the newspaper, not killing myself, showering regularly. And I give advice to people and listen to them and feel moved by their confidence in me. I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow I’m going to get a grip on myself.
—but really it’s that last clause there hanging from the colon that I most connect to. For tomorrow, I too will get a grip on myself.
Highly recommended.
Biblioklept 